In “Walking,” Thoreau not only defines sauntering as one of his cherished pursuits; he also self-consciously chooses a “perfectly symbolical” shape or contour for his sauntering journeys: "The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola . . .like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-...

I first started seriously reading the works of Henry David Thoreau almost twenty years ago when I was researching the biogeography of a particularly rare group of alpine butterflies. Back then I used to spend my time during the early summer...

Essentially RevolutionaryHenry Thoreau's Radical Moment—and Ours

By Wen Stephenson

On a clear and seasonably cold Sunday morning in March, I made my way through the streets of an old neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, and entered a large, converted brick building from some other century. Inside, in a cavernous room with worn floors and south-facing windows lit by the sun, a group of seventy or more young climate activists—mostly college students and recent graduates from the Boston area, along with a few veterans of the Occupy and global justice movements—...